Except for eating and sleeping, all other human activities are fake now.
But another part of me realizes that everyone is using Fusion360, despite the fact they have a history of taking away features to force people to migrate to paid tiers. So it probably doesn't matter.
But browsers (and browser technologies) have documented track of being fully backward compatible up to the beginnings of WWW, and it's not going to change.
Which actually is much much better than any other environment you can imagine - unless of course you use (and want to use) that one frozen in time 25 year old PC. And pray nothing breaks (y2k bugs and whatnot).
If the software is open source (and works offline) you can have it functional in 10 or 20 more years. And it will be "locally-installed software you own" you want.
That, my friend, is not how offline works. You will be required to have internet access in one way or another. Offline works 100% locally no matter if you have internet or not.
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Using the scarf example - nobody's paying you to knit it. Knitting it probably won't put food on your table. Maybe for tribal humans that kind of thing did, hence the psychological reward wiring, but not now.
Here's a reality: we do all become obsolete. It's called aging. I don't know how exactly to fit that into that puzzle, but my brain told me it's a relevant reference point, somehow.
A hiring company just wants you to make the thing with an optimal balance between quality and efficiency.
As I see it, one has a few options. A common one is just hoping everything will be okay. Often that turns out to be the case.
Another one is to proactively 'adapt or die'. Master the new way of making the thing even if it tastes bitter. Harder to do with age, but in some sense the obvious choice if you want to be competitive.
Speaking of, I think we often forget that - the world is one big competition for resources and survival. Happiness is a luxury, but we've converted it into a requirement.
I'm not saying I like any of this - I want to be secure for life following the same old patterns I've already learned as well.
But I consider that thought a comforting fantasy to be eyed with suspicion.
That said, thankfully, AI is still pretty good at enshittifying things, so I have a suspicion that one may not need to always adapt that enormously. I work with a lot of legacy software, and have seen that a lot of companies are full of old school tech debt for which hands on programming is still a must have.
Claude code or what have you is a little limited when you're writing code for obscure software packages which nobody knows the name of anymore, but on which some companies still depend for their core business logic.
Will it all dry up eventually? Sure. But slower than we expect methinks.
And that will ultimately buy China a lot of time to shove their ram into the market cutting ram manufacturers out of most non-US markets.
I think the major memory manufacturers are simply banking on their ability to flood the market if worst comes to worse. That or I could see some standards trickery around DDR6 (or some new BS standard). It'd not shock me if they coordinated with AMD/Intel to keep the standard secret as long as possible simply give themselves a lead in production.